Monday, August 31, 2015

The Shop sits on a road called Farm.
It’s a cinderblock building on a concrete slab that is divided in half by a
thin wall. One half is offices, the other is a warehouse full of tools and
steel pipe, an old Murray lawnmower without a hood, a white 1994 Ford F-250,
tubs of Gojo, motor-oil, two tall wooden shelves full of pipe fittings, an
ice-machine, a STIHL calendar with bikini models on it, five-gallon buckets, a
cardboard cutout of Bill Elliot, a big monkey stuffed with beans, ladders, one
hundred empty cans of Kodiak, a scissor lift. Across the street is a
transmission shop. To the left is an empty lot where a VW bus is parked with sweet-gums
growing out of the windows.

My grandfather bought the Shop
sometime in the early eighties after telling the bigwigs at Grinnell to suck
his ass and after working for a little while from my grandmother’s kitchen
table.

My grandfather will be turning seventy
soon. He likes to talk about retiring. I think if he really does retire, he’ll
die, despite his health. Good health can only take a man so far.

His secretary, Nance, is at least as old
as he is. She still uses a typewriter and a rolodex and sticks post-it notes
all over the Shop like they’re wallpaper. She was always kind of fat, but these
days it’s gotten to where it’s almost fascinating. Normally my grandfather
hates fat people, even though he’s growing a little liquor gut himself. He
yells at Nance like he’s married to her.

My dad started working for my
grandfather when he was seventeen, as a helper. After he graduated, he went to
school in Sumter for two years and got an Associate’s degree in Forest
Management, then went to work full-time fitting pipe. He is forty-seven now. He
hates his job. I think he hates his life. He haunts the Shop like a ghost.

When my dad goes to the gas station for
a drink or a can of chew, he brings Nance back a snack-cake or a pack of Jolly
Ranchers. He always picks on her about Jesus. She thinks he’s the funniest man
in the world. She probably loves him more than she loves Jesus.

When I was sixteen, I started cleaning
the Shop. They paid me fifty dollars a week to scrub the commodes and vacuum
the floors inside. My grandfather gave me a key. It was the first key I ever
had to anything. My dad gave me an apron.

My grandfather keeps a lot of pictures
in his office of me and my cousins; my dad and my aunt and uncle; my grandmother.
There’s a stuffed pheasant on the wall and a piece of paper with a cartoon
buzzard that says: “Patience, my ass. I’m going out and kill something.” I’ve
never known what that means. There’s also about fifty copies of handprints
tacked over the window from biggest to smallest, with the owner’s name written
on the bottom of each one.

When I was seventeen, I had sex with a
girl named July in that office, on a drafting table, at a kind of weird angle.
Afterwards, cleaning the toilets, my back was sore as hell. Driving her home,
the whole car stunk like bleach.

At the Shop, trucks cling to the parking
lot like the shed skins of men. My dad drives a tan colored Chevrolet with a
broken tailgate. My grandfather drives a Ford Sport-Trac: it’s green. It used
to have two gold racing stripes down the middle, but it doesn’t anymore. My
uncle drives a two-wheel drive F-150; clean and well-oiled, like him. The workers
drive dirty, faceless trucks that cough when you crank them.

In the mornings they gather, these working
men, in the lot like dogs. They are every color. They stand in a broken circle,
wearing short-sleeves, even in winter—thankful for the cold. One of them has a
mustache and one of them has an eyelid that sags half-way over his eyeball.
They don’t drink coffee. My father stands before them like a priest. He lays
blueprints out on the hood of some truck and draws on them with a square pencil
sharpened with a knife. He brings home a little over eight-hundred dollars a
week.

My uncle moved to the Shop from Texas. He
is my dad’s younger brother. He lived in Texas for my entire life with his wife
and two poodles, one black and one white. They knew how to do tricks, like play
dead. When he moved here, my grandmother said he was coming home. The floor of his office is covered
in the shells of sunflower seeds. Sometimes he leaves his radio on over the
weekend. He tries to teach Nance how to email.

My own brother loves to go to the Shop.
He’s eleven now. He climbs up in the lift and grabs the joystick like it’s his
own dick and drives the thing around like a madman. He hooks the safety chain
onto one of his belt loops, but he never goes up. He says he’s never going to
college. He says he’s going to own a Shop that sells and works on lifts.

“There’s only one problem,” my dad says.
“You’re scared to go up without me.”

My dad’s office is outside, in the
warehouse. It has a cracked tile floor and a desk and a metal folding chair
that I’ve never seen him sit in. He wears boots every day until the leather
begins to peel off of the steel toes and then he throws them away and buys
another pair.

I quit cleaning the shop when I went to
college and they hired a woman to do it. I took up working odd hours for a
plumber.

“School comes first,” my grandfather
said.

“I should’ve know you’d turn full queer,”
my dad said. He calls plumbers hockey jockeys. “There’s only three things you
need to know to be a plumber,” he says. “Shit flows downhill, payday is on
Friday, and knockoff time is at 3:30.”

I quit that job too.

There’s a squirrel that lives in a pine
tree that rises up over the Shop like a steeple. It jumps from its tree onto a
power-line and then from there onto the roof. My grandfather wants it to be killed
because he says it’s getting into the Shop through the roof vents and eating
the insulation. My uncle bought a pellet gun and spends at least two hours
every day trying to shoot the squirrel. If he ever kills it, I think he’ll cut
the tail off and zip it up in his fly and walk around with it hanging out like
that until it rots.

“You know,” my dad says, eating a gas
station hotdog off the hood of his truck, his shirt soaked through with sweat,
his knuckles black and scabbed; he is smiling with the thought in the corner of
his head that in a few hours he will drive home and have the opportunity to run
his truck headfirst into an oak tree, but won’t; will go home instead to my
mother and that crumbling yellow shack and count the hours until he can go back
to the Shop; leave his family behind for a little while; further break his gnarled
back. “That ain’t the only squirrel that can climb.”

Someone painted the front door of the
Shop red. It looks like lipstick on an old woman. It shows her age: her tits
are sagging, there’s cobwebs in her eyes, her carpet has grown moldy and is
starting to stink. She could use a new set of shingles.

My grandfather will be turning seventy
soon. My dad will be fifty, half dead. Nance goes home at 4:30, and my uncle
knocks off at five. When the men come back from their jobs, they get in their
emphysematous vehicles and leave. My grandfather goes out into the warehouse and
runs a push-broom over every inch of the cement floor. My father sits on an
upturned bucket, reading the paper and spitting into a bottle of motor oil.

“Go home, boy,” my grandfather says. “Go
home.”

“I will.”

“There’s nothing left to do here.” He
leans his broom against the wall and stands in an open bay-door and looks out.
The sun is beginning to set over the top of the transmission shop. He is
nothing but a shadow.

He reaches up and grabs a string, pulls
the door shut, and the whole warehouse is dark. My dad folds his paper and
stands. “I’ll see you tomorrow then,” he says.

“I’ll be right here.” They go inside to
my grandfather’s office together. They look silently at the photographs strewn
about the room like dust—vestiges of another life outside of the Shop. They turn off all of the lights, lock the
doors, and go out to the parking lot. They nod their heads and get into their
trucks and drive towards home.

Robert Maynor is from the Lowcountry of South
Carolina. He has worked as a commercial plumber, dishwasher, cook, landscaper,
and musician. His stories and essays have previously been published in Bartleby Snopes and Lander University’s New Voices. He is twenty-two years old.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

There’s
a lava rock wall in front of a Maui condo complex from which a nondescript sign
announces the complex’s name, a series of leapfrogging n’s and o’s heralding vacation
before you’ve even dragged your jet-lagged self out of the rental car. The
wall’s rocks are rough and my daughters’ skin, still mainland pale, appeared
delicate in comparison as they stood under the sign for the requisite photo in
their matching sundresses and Salt Water sandals, their hair not yet
chlorine-brassy and their noses not yet peeling.

Nine
years later Mom and Dad invited me back to Maui; they returned every April or
May and always stayed at the complex with that rock wall. My husband endorsed
my joining them, probably hoping time away would have a mellowing effect on me,
and assured me he could handle his job, the house, three kids, and our
Dalmatian for a week. A week! It was too good to be true.

“Are
you sure you don’t mind?” I asked him. “Because you’ll have to get the girls
back and forth to school.”

“Yeah,
I know,” he said. “Don’t worry—I mean, I can
drive.”

I
shook my head. “It’s not just that. Things come up that you never have to deal
with, things you don’t even know
about: permission slips, missing library books... There’s more to it than just
driving.” Then I said, so quietly he asked me to repeat myself, “Besides, what
about Erin?”

“What
about her? I told you, we’ll be fine. Just go have fun.”

I
half-heartedly bought sunscreen and a paperback or two, and agreed—perhaps too
enthusiastically—when others said, “That’s so exciting you get to go!” What
they didn’t know was that a lethal cocktail of melancholy and guilt threatened
to derail my trip before it even started. Worse, I feared my cocktail glass
would be refilled every time I saw the sign hanging on that rock wall and
remembered my girls standing under it.

I’m
not sure how old they were in that photo—probably five, six, and eight. It
seemed as if time stood still then, like I’d be forever unsnarling tangles from
tender scalps and refereeing turns in the front seat, and I remember feeling
comfortably stuck, contentedly itchy with life’s predictability. Now, even
though it had been six years since life morphed from comfortable and
predictable to this, returning to a
spot we’d all enjoyed seemed callous, like I was trying to forget—or
ignore—what has happened. Because today, Erin, our oldest, is in a wheelchair,
nonverbal, and permanently disabled. She will never stand or speak again.

Six
years after that photo was taken—six years after she tied a plastic grass skirt
around her waist and swayed her nonexistent hips, six years after buying her
sisters puka shell necklaces with her allowance—Erin lay in a teaching hospital’s
ICU in a medically-induced coma, her private room so crammed with monitors and
IV pumps and nurses that she seemed inconsequential by comparison. She
eventually survived the tenacious virus that breached the usually unbreachable
blood-brain barrier. Or, that is to say, doctors called her existence survival.

I
expected things to become more complicated as the girls got older, and when
Sarah, our middle daughter, accidentally baked her pet rats Phoebe and Camille
in a misguided attempt to give them a morning of fresh July air (which became
intense heat sooner than Sarah anticipated), I felt a perverse sense of relief
despite my rants about irresponsibility. The complications I anticipated were
along the lines of nefarious boyfriends and speeding tickets; sun-dried rats, I
decided, would provide exemption from future catastrophe.

Often
I wondered if Erin’s doctors were misguided, if their achievements weren’t
necessarily in Erin’s best interest; if her survival—by their fluid
interpretation, anyway—would be enough. In the era of that photo, I believed
Erin’s future held more than the comfortable predictability she was raised
with. The particulars swirled in my imagination like glitter, bits of hope and
promise catching the light but not settling into a discernable pattern. That
pattern took shape in Erin’s early teens, her passion for space exploration
blossoming into dreams of a NASA career, and while she lay fighting for her
life in ICU, a dog-eared NASA application packet with the return address of
“Astronaut Selection Office” lay at home on her bedroom desk—which illustrates
the fluidity of the word “survival.”

We
did our best to maintain an illusion of normalcy during Erin’s eleven-month
hospitalization, but life felt like a series of wrong choices: spending time at
Kelley’s science fair awards instead of at Erin’s bedside, or letting Sarah and
Kelley go to Catalina Island with Mom and Dad for the day despite a nagging
fear that the ferry would sink. I was governed by guilt and doubt, no longer
trusting instinct or common sense. Part of that, I know now, is because life
was upended for no reason other than a willful virus. Nothing seemed safe
anymore, or sacred, or sure. In a matter of hours I had gone from weighing
Erin’s desire for our attendance at her space launch, to listening as a
neurosurgeon recommended sawing away part of Erin’s skull. Now I was afraid
seeing that condo’s sign would unnerve me more than finding those two caged
heatstroke victims in our backyard.

I
was in no hurry to leave our rental car’s backseat despite the five-hour flight
spent seat-belted to a barely cushioned concrete slab, my reluctance having
nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with avoiding that sign for as
long as possible. But as fate would have it we neither hit traffic nor careened
off a cliff so here we were, pulling into the condo’s parking lot, and there it
was, not thirty feet in front of us. Empty, is what I thought—the wall looked
empty without three little girls in front of it. I waited for the smack upside
the head I’d expected, the harsh realization that all three girls would never
stand here—or stand anywhere, for that matter—ever again. The smack never came.

I
spent hours on the same chaise lounges the girls squirmed on as they waited to
go swimming after lunch, Coppertone making them slick as eels, and on the same
beach where they built castles that melted like sugar with the tide. The smack
never came, but a revelation did: even if Erin hadn’t gotten sick, even if our
whole family was here right now, the girls wouldn’t be in matching sundresses,
I wouldn’t pose them for another cheesy picture, and there’d be no more sand
castles. It had nothing to do with Erin’s illness, and everything to do with
the passage of time.

After
Erin got sick I spent countless nights wondering if her survival would be
enough, if blinking and breathing and swallowing would be enough for a girl
with the former determination—and the former smarts—to join NASA. But in my
either/or mind, I’d lumped “survival” and “NASA” together: Erin couldn’t have
one without the other. When those sand castles were washed away, the girls
built new ones, some more elaborate than the original, some less, but they
didn’t stare at their now-vacant lot pining for what was.

The
nonverbal, wheelchair-bound Erin will never join NASA. But the able-bodied Erin
would not have received a standing ovation upon her high school graduation
three years after she was almost declared brain dead, or be named Ambassador of
the Year for her involvement with a nonprofit that provides wheelchairs to the
disabled in Third World Countries ten years after that. The old Erin lived
large, but so does the new Erin—without ever uttering a word.

I’ve
returned to Maui every year since then with Mom and Dad. That rock wall is
still there, but it no longer symbolizes evaporated plans—now it’s simply
jagged stones, possibly thousands of years old, possibly manmade and bought at
Home Depot, stacked like a jigsaw puzzle. And if I look closely, I see tongues
orange from POG juice, fingers sticky with Roselani ice cream, and am reminded
of what’s waiting at home.

Linda Tharp loved language from an early age when
she first realized words can hurt
you, a tactic she employed against neighborhood bullies due to her inability to
throw either sticks or stones very far. She lives in Southern California with
Gary, Erin, and grand-dog Maggie, and is currently writing a memoir based on
the impact of Erin’s illness.

Monday, August 3, 2015

Corn
Snake Mike is pointing out a wooden bird house on the edge of his property and
is beginning to tell the story of how he came to build it when a broad-chested
blue jay darts down to rest on its roof.

“Almost
as big as a kingfisher,” I say.

“Close.”

Instead,
Mike tells the story of an abandoned hatchling blue jay a neighbor found
squeaking on his porch. That neighbor knew to bring it to Mike. He took it in, hand
fed it, raised it up indoors: “It learned to imitate the sounds of the house.” He
tells me about the first time the blue jay barked like a dog, then when it
learned to whistle, and finally when it started imitating the ringing of his
kitchen phone.

“My
father would come in and answer the phone and yell about pranksters because no
one would be on the line!” He follows this punchline with his habitual,
guttural laugh and a push of his glasses. He is wearing a black T-shirt and on
it is an eagle carrying a banner that reads “100% American” and practical
sneakers. I know that, before becoming a Corn Snake guy, Mike was raised here
in the south and retired from the automobile manufacturing industry. He tells
me more about blue jays, how they love anything shiny, how he trained his to
take pennies from his hand and drop them into his shirt pocket only to land on
him later to ensure the coin was safe.

I’m
not sure how I first found Mike, but I do remember that at the time an internet
search of “Corn Snakes” and “Florida” turned up his home-made website as a top
result. I asked him once how his website got so much traffic; it turns out he
had taken a continuing education course search engine optimization, and the
next month, he was in the top ten results in Google for “Corn Snakes.” We are
friends now, but at first, I was just a guy curious about snakes and he was a
popular google search.

Why
snakes? Slithering, yes. But isn’t there
something elegant about it? And their skin! Cooler, smoother, and much softer
than anyone who has not held one might imagine. That curious flicker of tongue,
those severe (concerned?) eyes. For such a simple animal, it can be polarizing;
as an order the serpent elicits a response matched by few, save the arachnid. My
curiosity includes serpents, but also extends to other reptiles, or more
accurately ‘herps,’—a commonly truncated nominalization of the word
‘herpetology,’ the scientific study of reptiles and amphibians.

When
I talk with Corn Snake Mike, we stand between the side by side sheds: the snake
house on the right, fully insulated and temperature controlled, and the
smaller, less sophisticated hut on the left that he calls the “Mouse Farm.” It
houses hundreds of adult mice alongside their thousands of offspring, many of
the females puffed out awkwardly at both sides like those pickup trucks with
obtrusive double wheels on the back axle. All generations live together in
plastic tubs: pinkies (the babies, named because they are furless), fuzzies
(for their short fur), hoppers (they are jumpy), and other adults. Screens top
each tub, pinned down by old peanut butter jars filled with water, a small hole
drilled in the bottom so the mice can lean up and suck a droplet through the
mesh.

There
is also the side of the ‘farm’ I choose not to see—the table where Mike does
the killing. “I just grab them by their tails and wham!” He gesticulates a fast
turn of his wrist, a quick, mechanical snap—a motion he repeats hundreds of
times each week. “They never feel a thing ... it is like falling off a twenty
story building for them.” The silent victims of the pet trade, millions raised
like miniature cattle, slaughtered to sustain pets, mice and rats are used in
lab experiments because they share DNA strains with humans. Ultimately, we
sacrifice these millions of mammals, our close genetic kin, to facilitate the
hobby of keeping cold blooded species.

This
is a world I have found myself in, but not without reservations. Animal
husbandry has always operated on a basic tenet of symbiosis: grain for eggs, pasture
for milk. The arrangement with traditional pets is a bit less concrete, but
clear; well-timed treats for loyalty, affection, or a coy purr.

This
is more difficult to explain in terms of herps.

Yet
they are bred nonetheless, in impressive numbers. According to a study presented
to the 112th Congress, some five million homes in this country house
nearly fifteen million reptiles, and as a nation we exported an additional
eleven million. Most of these are produced by hobbyist breeders in small spaces
like Mike’s, and a huge cottage industry has risen alongside it.

Mike
has huge varieties of corn snakes in his collection. I would drive up his long
dirt driveway and park along the chicken wire he uses to coral his hens and
tortoises, and he would appreciate my interest and explain to me the tenets of
good snake husbandry. But there was one piece of the corn snake puzzle Mike
never really addressed: the science.

So
I read. I found online forums and bought corn snake books written by the
respected breeders in the field. I got a juvenile ‘normal’ (the ‘wild’
coloration and pattern) from Mike and kept him as a pet, mostly because I wanted
one, but partially for the purpose of familiarizing my wife with the notion of
having a reptile in the house. This wasn’t an easy sell at first. “I don’t
think we are snake people,” she would say, invoking the stigma of the snake.

In
my research I learned that, like the modern dog, reptile breeders work to
isolate aberrant genetic traits. For corns, these genes have been mostly
recessive, and include amelanistic genes, anerythristic, hypomelanistic,
diffused, dilute, stripe, motley, lavender, sun-kissed, lava, charcoal,
caramel, and cinder. What is further is that these genes are on separate alleles
and hence can be combined to make literally millions of potential varieties,
called ‘morphs.’ There are candy cane corn snakes and pewter ones, avalanche
and coral, plasma, gold dust, and citrine. There is snow, opal, and both—snopal.
And each year people are breeding to further diversify the offerings in what is
the largest segment of the pet trade running, though being outpaced in terms of
growth by more exotic snakes like pythons and boas (for the corn snake is a
species of colubrid native to the US). Eventually, I found a pair for myself
that were heterozygous for multiple traits and could hence produce variegated
offspring.

And
like that, I was a snake breeder. I have learned that it doesn’t matter how
many pairs one has, even if it is a single pair of domestic and otherwise non
‘exotic’ colubrid, if they produce eggs, then one is irrevocably a snake
breeder. My wife can say goodbye to her weekly book club if that gets out.

As
a father of snakes, I have become much more attuned to the stigma surrounding
them, particularly in a state like Florida where venomous species are
indigenous. There is a kind of ubiquitous serpent mythology here; local
newspapers document rattlesnakes simply for having the nerve to be seen in
public. In my neighborhood, I have seen dozens of ‘rattlesnakes’ killed and
laid out with the trash, only to identify them has harmless, overgrown Florida
garters, racers, or banded water snakes. A friend of mine actually will not use
the word ‘snake’, and instead calls them esses (for the letter S, and the sound
they make), because in his experience, uttering the very word conjures them.

It
would be misleading to say it is a local phenomenon. In the Judeo-Christian
tradition, the first man and woman were duped by a devil in serpentine form. Similar
mythology has sprung up around the Ebola virus. The story goes that the virus originated
from a woman carrying a basket containing a snake. When opened, the snake gave
Ebola to the first man it encountered. It is said that the serpent is still
alive, roaming the country side, only now it can, like the equally terrifying snake-headed
medusa, stricken a man with Ebola just by fixing its gaze on him.

The
fear of snakes is logical as metaphor. The snake—as an extension of nature, of
death, of disease—can live in plain sight undetected, and then when it is not
at all expected, rise and strike with unmatched accuracy. For that reason, it is
not quite the danger that scares us, but the quiet cunning of the thing.

Of
course, this is not the experience with a clutch of eggs. Like an expectant
mother, I fretted over the oblong eggs and watched them swell. I checked
temperatures, humidity levels, and practically prayed over each nose ‘pipping’
out of its egg. I was, after all, growing living beings from a shoebox of peat
and perlite in the stifling heat of my office closet. I did end up with some genetically
unique animals, though when I compared them to the morphs Mike had in his
collection, they weren’t really anything new, other than how vivid the ‘cube’
pattern was that graced the dorsal line of a handful.

Breeding
aside, my favorite snakes of Mike’s aren’t the unique, strange, genetically
aberrant in his collection. My favorites, by far, are a pair of ‘wild’
sub-adult yellow rat snakes that have found their way into the Mouse Farm and
have taken up residence, pressed into the narrow slot between two tubs of mice.

In
the shed, Mike opens a mouse rack: an offering. The rat snakes come over and
peek in, look back at us for a moment, and snatch one of the scurrying bunch.

I
love these yellow rat snakes, not because they are more beautiful than the
selectively bred specimens next door, but because of their condition. Their
presence, in as much as we can anthropomorphize the behavior of cold blooded reptiles,
is an act of volition. They are free to leave, but because of Mike, because of
his mice, they remain—without enclosures.

When
I happen upon a wild snake, I try to give them that same choice. Choose not to
bite me, and you might come to my home. Choose to eat my food, and you can
stay. It is a simple system that creates some sense of contract between two
living beings.

So
why not stop there, with a wild snake that has ‘chosen’ to stay? If husbandry
is ultimately a refined form of biological symbiosis, and we do not receive the
obvious benefits from reptiles that we do from other animals, what is it that
we gain from the keeping of herps? Perhaps I raised snakes for the same reason
I write—to accomplish the most challenging thing in the world: creating
something unique, beautiful, and complete.

Perhaps
the entire “exotic” pet trade is, in some way, an effort to compartmentalize
the wild element of nature into something manageable and urban. We restrict
animals to square boxes the way the sun is contained behind the right angles of
the neighbor’s house, the high-rised skyline. The mouse farm, the snake racks,
our own homes and neighborhoods—all of us in boxes.

But there
are other explanations that I worry about. Does this make the animal into
spectacle? The same kind of misguided apotheosis as the circus elephant,
crowned, bejeweled, glorified, but depressed and severely malnourished when
back in its cage? Perhaps it is a symptom of the dissonance between man and
nature: the best we can do is scrape together this facsimile of wildness, a
tamed pseudo-beast that would rather allow itself to be manhandled than to
strike out in its own defense, to provide ourselves a surrogate for nature. Does
it in some way relieve the burden of our manufactured cartons, the various
cloistered spaces of our lives? Perhaps we find it more tolerable knowing that
something ‘wild’ is similarly confined and still surviving. Or worse, is it
vindictive: I am in a box, and so it will be for you. Misery loves company,
scales and all.

It wasn’t
long after writing on this subject that I went back to see Mike, and of course,
to pick up an order of mice. It was spring and as we spoke I noticed the boughs
of his white grapefruit trees were full and bent to the point of breaking. He
offered me whatever I could reach, and told me about his two varieties of fig
trees. Through the branches, I noticed one of his bird houses that line the southern
corner of his property. It is always difficult, I thought, to imagine the
bird—with all its darting and soaring—contained in a wooden box.

“There are
actually two nests in that—one in the house, and another below it in the top of
the log where something bored out an opening. You can lift up the house and see
a second nest beneath.”

We walked
over. Mike told me he had seen a tufted titmouse going in and out, and hoped
that the nests would be full of eggs, or better, hatchlings. “Unless a rat
snake has made a meal of them,” I joked. Macabre, but this was the same place
where we let patient rat snakes feed on live mice practically from our hands.

His face
was solemn, “I sure hope not.”

We didn’t see
anything at first, but I whistled a bird call, and by the end, we counted five
down coated heads, popping up, mouths agape, waiting to be fed.

It was
these hatchlings that reminded me why we kept these corns snakes: the natural
world is magnificent but ever fleeting. The whole industry is but an attempt to
keep in boxes some connection to nature that is otherwise uncontrollable and transient.
We whistle and call it up to us, and after a glimpse, its downy head is back,
low and hidden in some thicket. This practice is a meager attempt to sustain that
singular instance in which nature is summoned to us, all beaks and scales, down
and fur, and graces us with a moment of mutual recognition.

Ed
McCourt is an Associate Professor in the English Department at
Jacksonville University. His essays and poetry have appeared in the Little Patuxent Review, the Portland Review,
Gravel Magazine, the Bacopa Literary Review, and elsewhere.